Who would look dangerously up at planets that might look safely down at plants?

Friday, 18 February 2011

Some old photos

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The transition from slides to digital images continues to be an awkward process; when most of one's photographic archive is still in transparency format it's often frustrating not to be able to use an image in a hurry. I've recently had a batch of scans made from slides taken in 1990, during my first year in Tanzania, when Charles Foley and I lived in an old hut at 2000 m on Kilimanjaro and undertook a census of the elephants in the montane forest. Even there, and when in residence for less than a year, I had to have a garden, seen in the image above. It was just a long narrow strip of dug soil, planted with bits and pieces of plants begged from friends (there were no nurseries in Tanzania in those days), or annuals grown from seed. It gave a lot of pleasure, and certainly brightened the rather drab immediate surroundings of the hut.

The hut, with our ancient Land Rover 109. The Afromontane forest behind is dominated by Cassipourea malosana (Rhizophoraceae), whose straight white trunks earn it the name Pillarwood.

The neighbours.

Inconveniences.

Elephant dung marked with an Alitag. We monitored these piles for months on end, observing their decay rate. The elephant census was based on a dung count, with three variables being important: the density of dung piles in the forest, their rate of decay, and the defaecation rate (the standard figure being 17/day). Knowing these three factors enables elephant numbers to be estimated with reasonable reliability.

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John Grimshaw's Garden Diary

A personal view of the world of horticulture and plants by a gardening botanist and author, living in Settrington, North Yorkshire, and working as Director of the Yorkshire Arboretum, a partnership between the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Castle Howard.

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